Cover Studio
Designing front, back, and spine covers with AI-generated or hand-built art
The guided cover wizard
By default, Cover Studio opens as a guided four-step wizard that keeps the full creative brief and hands-on controls out of the way until you want them. A step rail on the left tracks where you are and lets you jump back a step at any time.
Step 1, Concept Preferences, takes a few optional plain-language inputs — all with sensible defaults — and synthesizes the art-direction brief behind the scenes; just click Next when you're ready. Step 2, Pick a Proof, generates a grid of nine quick, low-cost proofs so you can choose a direction cheaply before committing — pick your favorite. Step 3, Text Treatment, locks in the proof you picked as your final cover art and offers genre-styled title treatments you apply in one click. Step 4, Fine-Tune, drops you into the full Front Cover editor with your artwork, title, subtitle, author, and text styling already set, so you arrive most of the way done and only hand-tune the finish.
Prefer the full controls? Flip on Advanced mode from the step rail to reveal the complete creative brief, refinement, and concept-generation grid described below — the same experience power users can drive directly.
The proof grid keeps early exploration cheap: proofs are low-cost thumbnails, and only the proof you pick is rendered at full resolution.
Building the AI art-direction brief
On the Concepts tab, guide the AI before it generates anything: pick moods, a palette direction (chosen from swatch rows, no hex values required), and an imagery style, and note anything to avoid. A one-click path with no inputs still works if you'd rather let the AI decide.
Each brief proposes about three creative directions per section — palettes, moods, scenes, and layouts — that you mix and match. A plain-language summary sits up front, with the full detail one tap away. Refining the brief with natural-language feedback (“make the palette darker and more ominous”) or regenerating it keeps your earlier briefs on hand, so you can restore any of them if a later direction misses.
Designing the front, back, and spine
The Front Cover, Back Cover, and Spine tabs each carry their own text, background, and layout controls. Front cover text is title and author; back cover adds room for blurb copy and publisher branding; spine handles the vertical title/author treatment readers see on a shelf. None of the three surfaces requires the others to have art — a solid-color spine next to an AI-art front cover is a normal combination.
Give titles a traditionally-published finish with foil and metallic fills, six blendable textures (foil grain, brushed metal, grunge, scratches, paper fiber, canvas weave), drop and long shadows, outline, glow, neon, emboss, etched, gradient fills, and curved (arc) titles. Blend modes — multiply, screen, overlay, and soft-light — grade background scrims and vignettes over your cover art. On the front cover you can also set the title behind the imagery, weaving it around your subject with a painted foreground mask. Every effect is adjustable per text element on each surface.
- Effects and textures are independent per surface — a foil title on the front doesn't force the same treatment on the spine.
- Text-behind-imagery is front-cover only, since it depends on a subject to weave the title around.
Exporting for print (KDP) and audiobook (ACX)
Export a print-ready cover wrap from Cover Studio's Export tab. The KDP cover wrap computes spine width from your page count and paper stock and handles bleed automatically, producing the single wraparound PDF KDP expects for a print cover.
The ACX audiobook cover panel re-lays your front cover design onto a true 2560×2560 square — above ACX's 2400px minimum — by re-flowing text and center-cropping the art, rather than just cropping the rectangle down. It warns if your title or author name would be hidden by the crop.
If your cover is based on an approved AI concept, a disclosure reminder appears at every export point, since KDP requires AI-content disclosure at publish time.
Saving versions and series style kits
Save the whole cover design — front, back, spine, brief, and approved artwork — as a named version you can restore later. Keep a light and a dark variant side by side, or A/B-test two directions and restore whichever wins. Restoring replaces the current design, with a one-click option to save the current design first, and each saved version keeps its own copies of uploaded images so a later upload never changes a version you already saved.
If you're covering a series, save a cover's style — typography, colors, effects, and layout for all three surfaces, plus background type and genre preset — as a named series style kit, then apply it to any other project to lock in a matching look in one click. Content stays per-book: title and author text pull from each project's own metadata, and artwork, uploads, masks, and blurb text never transfer between projects.